Dear Andre,
I'm Gianpiero Morbello, serving as the Head of IOT and Ecosystem at Haier Europe.
It's a pleasure to hear from you. We just received your email, and coincidentally, I was in the process of sending you a mail with a similar suggestion.
I want to emphasize Haier Europe's enthusiasm for supporting initiatives in the open world. Please note that our IOT vision revolves around a three-pillar strategy:
achieving 100% connectivity for our appliances,
opening our IOT infrastructure (we are aligned with Matter and extensively integrating third-party connections through APIs, and looking for any other opportunity it might be interesting),
and the third pillar involves enhancing consumer value through the integration of various appliances and services, as an example we are pretty active in the energy management opening our platform to solution which are coming from energy providers.
Our strategy's cornerstone is the IOT platform and the HON app, introduced on AWS in 2020 with a focus on Privacy and Security by Design principles. We're delighted that our HON connected appliances and solutions have been well-received so the number of connected active consumers is growing day after day, with high level of satisfaction proven by the high rates we receive in the App stores.
Prioritizing the efficiency of HON functions when making AWS calls has been crucial, particularly in light of the notable increase in active users mentioned above. This focus enables us to effectively control costs.
Recently, we've observed a substantial increase in AWS calls attributed to your plugin, prompting the communication you previously received as standard protocol for our company, but as mentioned earlier, we are committed to transparency and keenly interested in collaborating with you not only to optimize your plugin in alignment with our cost control objectives, but also to cooperate in better serving your community.
I propose scheduling a call involving our IOT Technology department to address the issue comprehensively and respond to any questions both parties may have.
Hope to hear back from you soon.
Best regards
Gianpiero Morbello
Head of Brand & IOT
Haier Europe
If only they would have reached out this way the first time instead of a cease and desist, their brand getting dragged through the mud could have been avoided.
Well, how about having a local API and have no calls at all to your cloud infrastructure? Probably too easy and you cannot lock people into your ecosystem.
From any practical standpoint, this makes so much sense.
Sometimes my Tesla fails to unlock for some reason and I have to disable my VPN and then stand next to it like a God damn idiot for 10 seconds while it calls it’s servers in fucking California to ask it to unlock my car.
As if I needed yet another reason to never ever own a Tesla.
My car has this crazy technology in it: You can stick the key in the door and twist and it’ll unlock. Even if the network is down or the battery is dead. Arcane, right?
I will be driving my 03 1.8t 5mt Jetta into the ground, thank you very much.
I think it could definitely be possible to do locally, and I wouldn’t want a car where I have to connect to servers to connect to it. But I am also not sure I want a car that can be opened with a command on the car itself. The code to access your CAR being stored locally on the car itself, with no server side validation, does seem kinda scary. It’s one thing for someone to manage to get into your online login where you can change the password, it’s another for someone to literally be able to steal your car because they found a vulnerability. It being stored locally would mean people would reverse engineer it, they could potentially install a virus on your car to be able to gain access. Honestly, as a tech guy, I don’t trust computers enough to have it control my car.
It already unlocks locally over Bluetooth.
The issue you are experiencing likely has nothing to do with the VPN. Network connectivity is not needed to unlock the car. I have been in places with no cell phone signal and it still works.
I do sometimes experience the same issue you are. If I wake up my phone, then it works. So it may be working for you not because you disabled the VPN, but because you woke up your phone and it then sent out the bluetooth signal to let the car know you were nearby.
When I have the VPN on I get nothing but a “Session Expired” notice for several months at a time.
It’s a bit of both! Certain commands to the car can be done locally via Bluetooth OR via Tesla servers. The tricky bit is that status always comes from the server. If you are on a VPN that is blocked (like I use NordVPN and it is often blocked) then the app can’t get status and as long as it can’t get status it may not even try a local command. It’s unclear to me under what circumstances it does local vs cloud commands, and it may have to do with a Bluetooth LE connection that you can’t really control.
When you don’t have service, or you’re on VPN, it may be worthwhile to try disabling and reenabling Bluetooth. I have had success with this before. If you’re using android, it seems like the widget also uses Bluetooth, so you could try adding the widget to your home screen and using that. You can also try setting the Tesla app to not be power controlled, so it never gets closed.
Either way, there’s a definite engineering problem here that feels like it should be fixed by Tesla. But I can at least confirm that, even in situations with zero connectivity, you should be able to perform basic commands like unlock and open trunk without data service.